Wound Licking

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An instinctive behavior in both animals and humans when injured is to lick the wound.

Saliva does contain anti-bacterial agents and possibly tissue factors that promote healing, but it's not generally recommended in Real Life given the possibility of infection and especially not after major surgery. Hence the existence of the Cone of Shame.

Examples

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In one episode of Wolf's Rain Toboe is shown licking Tsume's injuries, which he objects to when he wakes up. Note that they're wolves who project illusions to make them look like humans.

One of Fist of the North Star's protagonist Kenshiro's most common actions in battle after being slightly injured is to touch the wound with a finger and then lick the blood off of it. It's one of the many ways he shows how badass he is.

In One Piece, not long after Zoro gets transported to Mihawk's personal island, he battled warrior gorillas who use their spit as first aid. Zoro lampshades it, being appalled by the gorillas' intelligence.

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In Beauty and the Beast, the Beast licks his wounds after rescuing Belle from the wolves, while Belle tries to clean them with fresh water instead.

Film — Live Action

In Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) after Alice returns the Bandersnatch's eye it licks the festering claw marks it left on her arm in their last encounter, causing them to heal in seconds.

Literature

Having brought the wounded rabbit Hazel back to Watership Down, Hazel and the other rabbits try licking the wound in Hazel's right flank. The tern Kehaar asks them if they've removed the little black stones. "Stones?" wondered Hazel. "Always with gun is come little black stones. You never see?" Kehaar then uses his narrow forceps-like beak to extract the shotgun pellets from Hazel's soft tissue. This scene is faithfully animated in Nepenthe Productions' Animated Adaptation.

Stray dog Lucky teaches the former pets the value of wound licking early in the first Survivors book:

"It's only bad because I haven't stopped long enough to tend to it. Look." He licked carefully at the wound. Sure enough, it felt better already. "Come on, Sunshine. Try it." Obediently Sunshine bent her head and licked rather dubiously at the scratch on her own paw. When nothing terrible happened, she tried again, and was soon washing it quite painstakingly. "You're right," she whispered in awe. "It doesn't sting so badly. It does feel better." She stopped licking to gaze admiringly at Lucky. "He's right, everybody!" "You see?" he barked. "You don't need a silly longpaw vet!"

Chrono Trigger: One of the first techniques that Frog (an anthropomorphic frog) learns is Slurp, which restores a small amount of health to himself or another party member, and does indeed involve him licking that person.

In Girl Genius Maxim licks his hand after it gets impaled by Old Man Death.

Exploited by Zii in Ménage à 3. When the she burns her tongue with hot coffee, she tells the attractive waitress Sonya that they need to apply saliva on the burn, and the best way to do that is making out. Sonya doesn't realize Zii has saliva in her own mouth.

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